Hey Microsoft, Privacy Has Many Facets

This week, Microsoft took a pretty nasty swipe at Google's Chrome browser, claiming that it compromises your privacy. If you read the words in just the right way, Microsoft has a valid point. The problem with Microsoft starting a fight like this, though, is that they have a lot more to lose than Google.The tempest that Microsoft is trying to brew in this teapot basically boils down to this: Google's Chrome browser combines the function of the address bar and search box in a single input field. When you start typing things into that box, Chrome sends the partial results to Google so that it can send back relevant results.

Let's clarify a few points here. First, Internet Explorer will happily send back the same sort of information if you type into the search box, rather than the address bar; it's not as if this is top secret stuff. Second, just about every search engine (that includes Google, Bing, and Yahoo) includes the same ajaxified search box that sends back partial results as you type. Third, if you trust Yahoo or Bing more than Google, you can easily change your Chrome default search provider to them, or turn it off completely. (Notice how the Microsoft video makes some noise about "default settings" in explaining this.)

I suppose that it's valid to argue whether the design decision of combining the address bar with a search box was a good one. Yet if you watch a lot of people actually use a browser, they are just as likely to use Google's home page as their address bar. So why not eliminate the confusion about which is which, use a single box for everything, and get people to their results faster? Chrome's configurability is significantly less confusing that Internet Explorer's, so an average person has a hope of understanding how to change things. (Among the 66 IE advanced options: "Enable automatic crash recovery" and "Warn if post submittal is redirected to a zone that does not permit posts.")

But the biggest reason Microsoft shouldn't start this fight is that IE has its own problems, ones that are much more serious than any in Chrome. As the browser with the most market share, it's wearing a huge target when it comes to exploits. Although Microsoft has made some great progress in securing IE, attackers are regularly finding ways to break through the defenses. Compare that to Chrome, which not only gets the benefit of a smaller market share but just seems to be much more secure by design. In the recent pwn2own contest, Chrome and Opera were the only two browsers not sliced to ribbons by security experts.

Most users don't have much to fear from Google getting partial search results from Chrome, but they have a lot of privacy to lose from IE security bugs. One of the pwn2own contestants said, "There are bugs in Chrome but they're very hard to exploit. ... They've got that sandbox model that's hard to get out of." When the experts start saying that about IE, then Microsoft can feel good about how they're protecting their user's privacy.